Edition 2 - January 2022
NEWSBITE
THE NEWSLETTER OF THE ANGLOPHONE SECTION AT CSI LYON
Snippets from Primary
Down on the (CSI) farm with CP!
Farmer Fullerton and the CP pupils spent a week looking after the chickens in our new chicken coop! We cleaned out the hay and made sure the chickens were fed every day. We even collected the very first eggs that they laid in their new home - which we then turned into delicious cookies! We are looking forward to learning more about our new feathered friends later in the year.
CE1 & CE2: exploring the magic of dragons
Our most magical unit so far on Dragons is a firm favourite with the CE1 class! It all began when we came into school, only to find chaos in Miss Fullerton’s room… a dragon had managed to get in! It left behind some tiny eggs, which looked as though they had hatched...
Things got stranger when we received a letter all the way from Wales, where a good friend of Ms Ayers’ had discovered a dragon egg! To help her out, we read a book called The Egg, where a young boy named George finds and raises a dragon. We used George’s tips to sequence and write instructions to send back to Wales.
Next we read a beautiful book, Tell Me a Dragon, and we felt so inspired that we decided to imagine, design and describe our own dragons!
We needed to use plenty of similes to describe our dragons, and we thought of some wondrous ideas. Some people’s dragon’s had eyes that flashed like lightning, while others shimmered and flowed like a waterfall. Truly magical!
We finished by designing and making dragon eyes out of clay and painting them. They are on display in school and we can’t wait to take them home soon.
In CE2 we rounded off our unit on How to Train your Dragon by writing our own Hiccup adventure stories. We brought in our understanding of Cressida Cowell’s pirate-y characters and put our sword-fighting vocabulary and figurative language to great use! We also painted fabulously creative dragon eggs to illustrate our non-fiction dragon texts (click on the stories to learn about the Crystal Cruncher and the Amazon Hider dragons).
Just before the break, we watched a few clips from the movie Klaus. These were especially chosen to prompt us to think about character and setting - a great way to develop useful skills for our reading!
CM1: spooky stories and elf job applications
Things have been pretty spooky down in CM1! The students have been learning a range of figurative language techniques and how to build suspense. Read the full story... if you dare!
We also wrote a variety of different kinds of stories, including fiction and non-fiction, inspired by our reading of A Long Walk to Water: you can read the stories here.
In the lead up to the festive holidays, the CM1 students enjoyed a unit of work based on the children's movie, Arthur Christmas. In this unit we wrote a job application letter to Santa to be one of his elves. We also made a Puppet Pal show, using the Ipads, based on a story we wrote: use the movie link to hear us reading our stories and enjoy the show!
CM2: stories, poems and Shakespeare
We started off the cold, grey year with an appropriately grizzly Shakespearean classic… Macbeth! This short unit was an exciting - and slightly gruesome - way to kick off January. We made sure that we understood the plot - exploring some excellent insults coined by Shakespeare along the way (Thou Banbury cheese!) - and then took a closer look at everyone’s favourite characters… the three witches!
After giving a dramatic performance of the most famous lines a witch has ever spoken (Double double toil and trouble/Fire burn and cauldron bubble…) we then moved on to creating our own, rather hideous, potion recipes.
We matched Shakespeare’s poetic structure by marrying the rhyming couplets with 7 syllable lines and a trochaic tetrameter rhythm.
We had some excellent, grotesque and hilarious poems as a result. We’re now in the process of recording them in Puppet Pals so watch out in the tech folders next time we send books home to watch a new spin on an epochal classic.
Next, we’ll be moving on to a longer unit based around a beautiful and uplifting novel called Esperanza Rising.